


A Great Age, Ending

by Papapaldi



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Corvosider - Freeform, Death of the Outsider, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-21 00:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17632853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: Billie Lurk had set out to kill the Outsider, but had instead given him something else; life. However, she left something else behind in the eye of the dead god, something which it had been promised ever since the Outsider marked her, not as his follower, but as his successor. As the young man struggles to adjust to his newly mortal existence, Billie feels a pull towards the darkness, back into the void, and Emily Kaldwin struggles with the loss of the power that accompanied her across the isles and through her idle days in court.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Post DOTO story that also fleshes out some of the lore (which is obviously speculation on my part) surrounding the Outsider's fall from grace (his transformation in Dh2) and the fate of Billie Lurk with all that 'eye of the dead god' business. 
> 
> Canon: This assumes sort of 'medium' chaos for both Corvo in Dh1 and Emily in Dh2, both have killed but they're not psychopaths that like putting springrazors on severed heads and throwing them into a crowd of civilians (because who would DO such a thing??)

I heard a whisper in my ear, a word that felt impossibly ancient and foreign, yet flooded my mind with grim familiarity and a stinging pain in my neck where a slash had once turned to stone. My name. 

When she ripped me from that hollow place, I felt my conscious plucked from the expanse, and stuffed violently back into a cruel shell, cut away from everything I had been in a heartbeat. A heartbeat; something I hadn't experienced in eons, life where I had expected, perhaps even wanted, death. The thick blackness parted before my eyes like clouds, as light touched my eyes for the first time in millennia. I saw her face, sharp and dark and scared; and collapsed into her strong arms feeling weight and touch and pain. Why hadn't she killed me? She held the twin blade, intertwined with the dark stone and black magic that had crafted her arm. Why had she not thrust it through my halted heart? I knew that had been her intention, and the intention of her mentor, whom she loved like a father. Billie lurk was not merciful, in fact I knew her to delight in the fading of light from the eyes, the falling blood from the blade. And I was her sworn target, the most deserving of death. So why did I live? 

…

She awoke to a dull throbbing pain on the back of her hand. It wasn’t the same as any pain she’d felt there before, not the tickling burn that set her nerves alight when the mark had been given to her. Not the dark, elating rush of power through her veins like flowing water as she leapt between rooftops on a coil of shadow, and not the nauseating pull from deep within her, like air being yanked from her lungs as she entered the blackness of the void. No, something had happened, something was wrong. The pain grew, cold and sharp, like a knife cutting into numb frozen skin, gouging not just the mark from her hand, but the power, and the connections tethering her to the world beyond. She sat up, groggy and sluggish, wincing at the strange sensation. She had little time for contemplation at the meaning of all this, because at that moment her pain crescendoed into excruciation, and she let out a piercing scream. 

The sound had escaped her before she could stop it, and she wondered if this was some terrible price she must pay for the powers bestowed upon her. She knew that such a price was coming by the way her father regarded his own mark with apprehension and a certain grateful disgust. Every tendon in her body was clenched and shaking against the pain, eyes so tightly closed that the shadows of lights behind her eyes spun and danced. But then, as soon as it had come, the feeling was gone – leaving only raw, throbbing flesh in its place. Something was different, and when she reached out to the void, she found nothing but herself, echoing back. She felt... incomplete somehow, yet there was an old familiarity to it, and loneliness. Emily Kaldwin knew then that the mark of the Outsider was gone. The door burst open and the heavy footed boots of the imperial guard thundered in, uniforms of red and navy, tassled and prim. 

“Your majesty!” One of them cried, breathlessly, “What is it? What’s wrong?” The urgency in their tones, their adrenaline, it made the empress feel ashamed.

She plastered on a smile “It was nothing, kind sirs, a nightmare is all.” She tried to appear unshaken. “I apologise for rousing you here for no reason other than my own imagination.” She scoffed a little, and smiled weakly at the outlines of their shocked faces.

“No problem your highness, think nothing of it. We are, after all, here to serve-“

“No need sir,” she knew their words by heart, and thought she might soon collapse from the suffocating aura the mark had left behind. “simply leave me to my rest and feel free to get some of your own.” The guards were unnecessary, but her father insisted. 

“Of course ‘majesty, begging your pardon.” The guards walked out, looking a little disappointed that there was no threat to valiantly dispel, no brave and daring rescue to brighten their boring nights as standing sentinels, no tall tales to tell by the firelight to their comrades while they drunk the envy and admiration from their eyes. Just as the guards left, another set of footsteps slunk in, softer and well disguised, so quiet, in fact, that no other ears would have noticed. Corvo Attano stood at the door, his face shrewd with concern. His left fist was clenched, popping veins, red raw skin, and a white swirling scar. He must have felt it too. Even though his own mark had been removed by Delilah months earlier, his connection to the void and the Outsider would never fade… until now. 

“Emily,” he spoke, a soft and caring voice, worn at the edges. “Are you alright?” A lantern swung in his hand, illuminating the dark chambers in tall, dramatic shadow. 

“I think so. It’s the mark, it’s gone.” It was only then that she realised just how saddened she was by this, after the pain and shock had almost faded away. 

“Yes…” He trailed off a little, placing the lantern down on a nearby set of drawers, “yes I thought as much,” he walked further into the room and sat on the edge of her bed.

“But it feels like more than that,” she started, reaching into her memories of the past few moments to recall what had come over her. 

“I don’t think it was simply a gift revoked. It was torn, cut away, it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve experienced before, certainly not like what Delilah did to me.”

“So you felt it too, even though your mark was gone?”

“I did, though I expect it was a mere echo of what you felt, my connection to the void has been fading these past months.” He held Emily’s hand in his, gently brushing the mutilated flesh with his thumb. She looked into his eyes imploringly, asking for more. “When Delilah took my mark, all she stole was my power, things that I could control and manifest physically. This time, everything holding me to the void has been severed, I can’t feel anything anymore, nothing beyond my own head. It’s strange… but welcome too, like I’ve awoken from a dream… but what about you, does it hurt? Can you still feel something?”

“Nothing... Nothing at all” She sounded miserable. She was miserable. “Do you know what it means?” She could see it in his eyes, that look of patronising understanding, there was sympathy and severity there.

“Emily, I know how you must feel. The power was – as much as I hate to say it – a part of you. But you need to understand that this is for the best. The path of The Outsider – my path – leads only to blood and regret.” It was the tone he took when he, albeit rarely, gave these fatherly insights of wisdom. 

“Sounds like you should go join The Abbey, Overseer Attano.” She forced a chuckle, and looked at him with indifference. She faltered, her father was serious. She recalled a night, as still, black, and uncaring as this one, though it had been sharper, richer, it had tasted of blood and ash, of rot and twisting roots, of revenge. She had brushed her hand across cold, jagged stone, and it had melted away into the flesh of her father. His eyes were wild as the life returned to them, his arm still outstretched to where Delilah’s throat had been (to her – months prior, to him – less than a moment ago). He stumbled, synapses receiving senses new and frightening, too much crammed into too little time. Only then had Emily let out a deep sign, gravelled and weighted with the pain of those past months. She had collapsed into her father’s arms, and he into hers, and they enveloped each other as they cowered in the defiled palace. They had been, if only for a moment, at peace. Until Corvo spied the mark etched into his daughter’s skin. He had grabbed her hand, so hard, so fast that it shocked Emily, that it almost hurt. He had cried, really cried, sobbing, wrapping her lithe hands among his, large and strong. It scared her. He had apologised, for what she didn’t know, he had looked into her eyes, searching her. He asked “How many,” she looked confused, and he implored her “How many dead?” She had looked away, strange that she felt guilt and shame toward a man who taught her how to swing a blade, who had carried her over piles of corpses to her throne when she was a child. She knew how it saddened him to see her cover her mark with gloves in court each day, lest her be marked as a heretic. He hated to see her live in fear of discovery, suppressing her emotions so as not to release them in a flurry of magic and blood. She knew he must be beyond relief at prospect of that burden being lifted, from both of them, giving them both a chance to move on from the time when those powerful gifts were the scales balancing life and death. 

“I’m sorry father,” she whispered, earnestly – and she was. 

“The mark, it’s power…” he was struggling to find the right words, as he so often did. But silence was not an option, not now, not with Emily. “It was a tool, nothing more. Something like that, you can’t let it become a part of you, have power over you. It served it’s purpose, you’re back on the throne and our enemies are dealt with.” He sighed, once again turning his attention to the red welts and heat radiating from where the Outsider’s mark had been on her hand. She tried not to wince as he examined it. “We have no need of power like that any more.” He closed his palm around the scar and looked up into her eyes.

But I do, she wanted to say, because she lived and breathed that darkness. She wove her way through the fabric of reality, the spaces between worlds, dancing from rooftop to rooftop and watching the city sleep. She lurked in the deepest of back-alleys scouring old shrines for enchanted ink and scraps of whalebone, for purple fabrics and sharpened stakes erected to the worship of the void – anything for the rush moving just that little bit fasted, to feel the sting of a blade or pound of the earth without damage, to peel away the veil of the world just that little bit farther… She knew it was dangerous, that she might lose herself to a life like that. In the moment, she didn’t care, it was the only thing that could relieve her from the day to day mundanities of cordial diplomacy and carrying an empire by her image alone. She did need it, that power, and she didn’t know what she would do without the music of the void to fill the spaces between her thoughts as she lived. She supposed she would have to find out.

...

When sleep found her again – her father still sitting there beside her, stroking her hand – she found herself in the void. It was different than she’d ever seen it. Different to the black hollow place that the Outsider called from, and different again to the sharper, golden spaces where Delilah stalked her dreams. This was another power entirely, calling out to her. The same black stone stretched out in slabs and jagged platforms in a swirling crimson sky. It was deep and bright, rich and fiery. A shrouded figure was standing on the landing below. She reached out through the mark that had once adorned her skin, trying to grab hold of those buried instincts and swing herself over the gap on a tendril of dark smoke. Nothing. She looked down at the back of her hand. Blank, even in the void. Instead, she clambered down over the edge, bracing her knees for a shock of impact as she landed behind the stranger. They wore a sharp crimson coat, a shock of black her twisting in the windless air. They turned. Meagan Foster – or rather, Billie Lurk – stared back. Her eyes were black and bottomless like those of the Outsider himself, and they swirled with the same red firelight that danced across these unfamiliar skies. She opened her mouth to speak, and Emily saw her lips form around her name before she woke up, cold and sweating in her palace bed.


	2. Chapter 2

“Look, err,” she didn’t know what to call him exactly as he lay there in her arms – to Billie, he looked just like any other “kid?” She tried, shaking him a little. His eyes flickered open, a shade of sickly pale green that stood out so strikingly against the surrounding blackness. He mumbled something about whales and dimming lights. “Kid?” She said again, louder this time, as the stone beneath them rumbled threateningly. “We need to get out of here, I don’t think this place is going to stay together without you in it.” She spied the swirling white vortex out across the black oily water – the exit. She sighed and dragged the boy to his feet. 

“I – I can walk,” he muttered, driving his feet in weak clumsy movements.

“Oh, you can walk can you?” she snapped, “fucking walk then, let’s go!” It occurred to her that she suddenly cared about making it out of this place alive. Coming in, she had assumed it to be a one-way trip. A mission to kill god generally came with a death wish – and who could blame her? After Deidre there was Daud, who pulled her up from nothing, but now he was gone too, and this mission had been his final wish. But now, seeing this – kid, as she was reluctantly classifying him as – she couldn’t help but feel some sort of obligation to protect him, especially after all the trouble she’d gone to to save him. They wouldn’t die here. She took a few steps towards the edge of the stone platform before she heard the Outsider whimper and crumple to the floor behind her. He couldn’t walk. She ended up having the half carry him across the ritual hold, all the way to that blinding white light as the space collapsed into spirals of crumbling black stone. 

The void beyond was fairing little better, and she scaled across the shifting landings in flashes of purple stone and wisps of light. Her powers were as strong as ever. The same could not be said for the envisioned – the ancient cultists-turned-stone monsters. They were collapsing in on themselves, stone grinding and chipping itself away as that golden light left their haunting eyes. The great eye was grey and glazed as a dead fish’s, and the piece of it jammed into her empty socket burned as she touched its surface and felt herself transported back into the mines. The boy fell to the ground once again as they landed on solid ground – his first taste of reality in millennia.

He was mumbling again. “Where did it go? Where did everything go?” She hauled him upright as he struggled to find his footing, he sounded distressed, maybe even in pain. “I can’t see it…” She put her arm around his shoulders and dragged him along. Those cultists that she hadn’t dealt with along the way were also having problems of their own. They were writhing around in varying states of agony and seemed totally unaware of the pair of them. Their skin was blackening to void-stone, and their fingers clawed up at bleeding eyes. Still the caverns above shuddered and threatened to bury them all. 

“What’s happening to them?” She asked, more to herself than anything – she had a habit of talking to herself after all those years alone at sea. 

To her surprise, the boy answered. “They drew their power from the envisioned,” he spluttered, struggling to speak between panting breaths, “they drew their power from me… there’s not enough humanity left in them to exist without that power. They’re dying.” He said all of it in a strange, detached tone – as if he were observing some mildly interesting phenomena instead of gruesome deaths. They pressed on.

What the hell was she doing trying to save this kid? Just because his own sad story mimicked lines from her own – he was a god, was there anything human left to save? 

They left the screams of the eyeless behind them as they exited their base. She could feel the pull of the void lifting as they slowly transitioned back into cold, hard reality – just how she liked it. The boy’s condition wasn’t improving, and she was starting to think that he couldn’t survive without the void, and maybe it couldn’t survive without him either. She made her way across the dusty gravelled roads back to her hideout with growing exhaustion. Her powers were no longer heightened, not now that the eye was so far away. She slung the boy down onto her mattress and slumped down against the wall, exhausted. The sounds of rumbling stone still hammered dully in the distance. The boy was out cold. 

…

She dreamt of the void. The skies were afire like the eye of the dead god, and she looked down to find her stony arm restored to flesh, and felt her eye returned as well. This place was different to any part of the void that she’d seen before. Normally, she could feel to place teeming with voices, lost souls drifting and screaming in a far-distant cacophony. This place was silent – peaceful, even. Before she had a chance to puzzle it out she heard something behind her. The landing was near silent, performed by someone trained to keep their muscles poised and their joints light. Emily Kaldwin stood before her, looking just as confused as Billie felt. She opened her mouth to address the empress but – before she could utter a sound – she woke up. Her joints ached and her head pounded. She realised that she had fallen asleep propped up against the wall of her hideout. She massaged her neck as she straightened up. That was when she noticed the pair of green eyes watching her from across the room.

...

“Bad dream?” The Outsider asked. It was strange to hear his voice as just that – a human voice – without that wash of whispers that used to follow it, the sounds that made her stomach twist with dread. She took the time now to look at him – to really look. When she’d found the documents marking his age at a mere fifteen, a child, she’d been doubtful, but now she saw the youth of his features creeping forth in the absence of all the darkness, fear, and mystery that usually surrounded him. Now he seemed skinny, not gaunt. Gangly, not tall. Young, not ageless. 

“Yeah, something like that,” she answered, voice groggy. 

“But it wasn’t really a dream, was it.” He wasn’t asking. “It was the void.” Even though his eyes had lost their onyx sheen, they still seemed to look right through her.

“You got me,” she sighed, “but it was weird, and I mean weirder than usual.” _Because you weren’t there,_ she implied.

“Hmm,” he considered, looking up at the bricked ceiling. A swollen moth circled around a single flickering bulb above. His voice was hoarse, from disuse, she suspected. 

“So, you’re not dead,” she mused. She remembered the way he had slumped over, pale and mumbling like a weeper. Here he was, still a little sickly looking (though that was to be expected after four thousand years in the dark) but otherwise fine. 

“I’m just as surprised as you are. You did come here to kill me.”

“Yeah, well, that was my intention up until…” _I saw you._ She trailed off, after all, she still wasn’t entirely sure of the reason herself _._ “How do you feel?”

He paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “I feel blind, and small, and lost –“

“Sounds pretty human to me.” The ground tremored slightly beneath them, the caverns beneath still grinding themselves down to nothing but churned earth. He was still staring in that far-off way, eyes stark against the dim, warm light. His expression was unfathomable. She wondered how much he remembered. 

“You should have killed me.” He muttered, barely audible.

“What?” She asked, incredulous. She forced out a chuckle, “you can’t be serious! After all that–“

“I know, I know,” he sighed. “I’m sorry I just… I can’t find the right…” his face was screwed up in concentration. “I can’t find the right words,” he resigned. 

She noticed he was shivering. “Hey, are you cold?”

He looked confused. “I mean, I could be? I’m not sure how it’s supposed to feel exactly.”

“Well you’re shivering like crazy you I’m going to say you are.” She reached over andpulled a musky blanket from the corner and tossed it to him. He wrapped himself up in it, pulling his knees up to his chest and propping himself up on the wall. “You should probably eat something too. She grabbed a slab of stale bread from her sack and tossed that over as well. He picked it up and looked at it, as if unsure what to do with it. She sighed, “you do remember how to eat, right?” 

“Yeah I do, it’s just…” he examined the bread thoughtfully. “I just realised I’m going to have to shit again.” 

Billie burst out laughing, something she hadn’t done in a long while. “Yup, and you’d better get used to it kid.”

He cocked his head to one side, curious. “Why do you call me that? You know I’m not a child.” She let out another chuckle – one that turned into another fit of laughter at the look of indignance on his face. “What?” He demanded. 

“Nothing,” she snorted, “it’s just that you sound like every kid ever.” A smile broke on his lips. She was glad to see it. 

“I’m not sure I really thought this through,” he murmured. 

“What do you mean?”

“I just… I didn’t want to die.” He chuckled, “Isn’t that funny? After all this time I’m still scared to die. I knew you were coming for me and I knew my time was ending but I still fought against it. I didn’t even take the time to consider what it would mean to be alive again.” 

“Do you want to be? Alive, I mean.” She asked, suddenly serious. 

“I’m not sure, but I’m going to be regardless. Not even I can fight against the instinct to survive.”

“That’s good,” she said, “that means it worked. That means you’re human.” He nodded, and went back to examining the bread in his hand. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Outsider recounts his downfall

I had known my time was coming for a long while, time to step back into the shadows and let a new entity take my place at last. I saw my threat, and her name was Delilah. 

Delilah Copperspoon was more than a witch, above the common bickering of her coven, with their hacked off patchworks of dead things, the grot and river slime, the blood and pus and strange pigmented herbs. She cared not for cauldron brews and superstitions, and she led no ordinary cult. I had never thought much of the urchin girl, the downtrodden sister of an empress, with burning spite in her heart. But she proved herself intriguing at the very least, a feat becoming much more difficult as the centuries passed. She was a bitter little thing, determined, and hungry for the power so long denied her. She clawed her way up from scum and decay, climbing on the backs of all who crossed her path. She was smart, talented, and she knew how to manipulate even the sharpest of minds. She wormed her way into the hearts of the aristocracy, painted works of art hidden with a layer of perception beyond the world itself. Together with the woman she loved, she sent a signal of sweet temptation, of power, and those who hungered for it came running from across the isles, eager for a share of Delilah’s great power. Though I had marked her as my own, she was beginning to think for herself, to test the true limitations of her power, and her connection to me. The first pet of mine to become, self aware, if you must. Still I watched from my place in the shadows with keen and unguarded interest. I shouldn’t have underestimated her. After all this time, I had become complacent. I had forgotten that I was once mortal, tied to this place by way of ritual, not right. 

When the time finally came that I recognised her power, I found myself scrambling for a way to stop her in her tracks. And so I whispered her name to the blunt knife Daud, who so feared death. The obedient mutt struck Delilah's little scheme into the dirt, and despite his intentions of self preservation, he walked away thinking himself an unsung hero of the empire. Emily’s salvation had been pure accident on his part. But somehow, Daud managed what I thought from him to be impossible, he surprised me. He spared Delilah’s life, thinking himself a good man as he did so. I realised then that I had made a terrible mistake, that of course it would be my own marked pets that would turn on me in the end, just as the faithful Billie lurk had turned on Daud, her old and withering master. Delilah was trapped within the void, a soul in eternal purgatory... but Delilah was smart, too smart, and she used her connection to the void the shape it to her will. 

I barely noticed at first, simply thinking her lost to the expanse, as had befallen so many before her. But Delilah wasn’t dead, she had performed a ritual. She had unearthed deep, forgotten magic, rituals of paint and pigments, of power drawn from long dead leviathans, come and gone long before me. She translated long forgotten languages into the crude, modern tongue, fashioned it into a message that the deeper world could understand. She drew her own spirit from her flesh, and would have forced its way into the body of young Emily Kaldwin, and stolen the throne she had always felt she deserved. She would have moved the pawns of the empire, reaching her bent influence like rotten roots, inside a little dark haired girl who was the pivot of the world. She could have cut down those who would see beyond those wide brown eyes, hear the snuffed out cries of a child stuffed down inside, she would have watched with an ill-disguised smile as those most beloved heads began to fall. Castilla. Samuel. Piero. Sokolov. And, of course, Corvo. 

Instead, Delilah found herself lingering behind the fabric of an island in the void itself. Instead of infecting the Empire of the Isles, she had grown outwards from the source, spreading her spirit like spores, rotting the void from the core. Something began to slowly break inside of me then, my eyes – my true eyes of flesh and blood – opening like slits, seeing the blurred and muffled prison; the ritual hold. It was dark, a richer and steeper darkness than I had seen in millennia. Some part of me woke up, some weakness that had been buried long before, with the slip of a knife and a hot, thick, trail of blood. I seemed to remember who I had been, missed it, felt some deep gnawing, growing injustice for what I had long regarded as something of a gift. Delilah was there, in my prison, looking down at me, curious, empowered, and somewhat scared. She had crawled, blindly, stumbled to the centre of all things. A part of me was proud, fatherly, she was mine and I had watched her grow into something formidable, even to me. At the same time I was humiliated, embarrassed that she was seeing me like this. My body, my flesh and blood and bone held in suspension at the heart of darkness, frozen in my final moments of violent protest, retaliation at the hooded cultists that had surrounded me, chanting, indifferent to the pain and the screaming and the perception beyond humanity drumming and buzzing in my skull. She saw the ancient altar beneath me, the stone anchoring, the darkness of the chamber reflected in my eyes, unseeing. Until now. 

At first it was a little frightening, I felt my hold over the void slipping, my power grew crude, subterranean, monster-like, and I felt my being becoming one with the dark jagged stone that had begun to populate my world, twisting outwards from the ritual hold. That dark tar spread like fungus, mycelium burrowing deep and infecting everything I had built. The pale, misty blue, grew dark, as if the sun was setting, into a quivering darkness thick and congealing. The fragments of the city began to disappear, floating islands built on patchwork pieces of the world lying beyond, people frozen, trapped in an essence of time, all were lost to me. I could barely see them anymore, time and space was jumbling up into a mess I could no longer swift through. I grew blind and lonely, until I would be alone, completely – the way it used to be. 

The void was beginning to detach itself from its companion world, it’s twin whom neither one could live without. It was returning to what it had once been, singular, wild, consuming. It changed me as well, as I was it’s vessel. I could feel a great age ending. My age. The age of Delilah would surely follow. 

She tapped into that place, my place, she discovered from what I drew my power, understood the nature of it, perhaps even better than I did. She discovered how to communicate with the world residing between the void, she reeled in old allies, friends she had made for the sake of friendship, of trust, and what that trust could bring her. She whispered, incoherently at first, but she became clearer, in the eager ears of Luca and Breanna, each believing themselves alone to be Delilah’s one, true, devoted lover. She instructed the minds of mortals, fragile things, incapable of understanding what they were never meant to perceive. She made that mistake with Aramis, the indifferent non-believer, whose mind decayed into madness at the sight of the void. Delilah, through her disciples, orchestrated a great ritual, equal, perhaps, to the one which brought me into power. She crafted the ritual with their hands, seeing through their dull, withering eyes. They smiled as she returned, as she stole a part of them to wrench her back to a crueller manifestation of physicality. By this time, she had already sucked the void dry, bitten it to the bone and scraped out the marrow – feasted on me. I was rendered near powerless in my own world, or at least, what I had so egotistically begun to regard as such. Although she had crossed over to the mortal world once again – the damage was already done. She marched on Dunwall to usurp the throne of the Isles, but she had already usurped my throne, and she would not be rid of that responsibility so easily. 

I had but one final hope. Emily. Although my power was dwindling, I had enough of a hold over the world for one last job. I marked her as my own, and it just so happened that retaking the throne of empress and retaking the throne of godhood both required that Delilah be disposed of. As Emily stood over the corpse of her aunt in the ruins of her throne room, decorated with stone men, dark vines, and the blood of the empire, I felt nothing. Delilah’s connection to the void was severed, yet, here I remained – weak and powerless and beginning to recall – and worse, hope for – more and more of what I used to be. Human.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo wants his bf back

After Delilah’s short-lived reign ended, Corvo spent his nights pacing, rabid and restless, jittering with the energy of his unlived days. He was scared to sleep, scared of what he might find waiting for him in his dreams. Most of all, he was scared to leave Emily’s side, he heard her tossing and turning, mumbling in her sleep. The two of them still slept in the throne room – the first place they’d attempted to clean out with the few helping hands the surrounding dwellings could provide. It would be weeks – months even – before reinforcements could be scrounged up from across the isles to replace those lost or scattered in hiding throughout the city. Delilah was gone, but the damage ran deep – a scar in the fabric of the city and it’s people. More importantly – a scar across Emily’s mind that made her cold, reserved, and quietly afraid. She was on edge, and finding it hard to readjust to her old life of relative ease. The work was there to take her mind off things. Rallying the people, sending letters and relaying messages across the empire that the empress was back where she belonged. Beyond that, there were the corpses of dead aristocrats and overseers to clear away. There were twisted roots of arcane trees to cut back and burn. Stone men to revive and powerless witches to hunt down and carter off across the broken bridge to Coldridge. It was endless – and it would be for quite some time. To him, all of it had happened in a moment. To her, life on the run had seemed a lifetime. After a few restless days and nights, Corvo Attano finally let sleep wash over him, pulling him deep under the fabric of the world, into a place he was both reluctant, and hopeful, to see. 

 

The void was darker and stranger than he had ever seen it. Gone were the heavy mists of blue and purple, serenely floating islands of crumbled stone and city, there was no peace here. The darkness was rigid, black, impenetrable. Stone spiked and curved at jaunted angles, sheen with the silver glow of some non-existent moonlight, some source from deep within. This place was cold, and it pressed against his heart, crushing inwards on a dam, about the break. His head was spinning. What had happened to this place? He felt him there before he appeared, the outsider materialised from the blackened stone itself, though he seemed… strange. Everything about him was darker, inhuman, returning to the silver-black stone from which his world was built. His voice was a high cold wisp, like a shiver, cold sharp air biting in the wind. He was a shade of his former self, he looked younger too, almost like a child. 

 

“Hello Corvo.” He cooed, his voice jagged and hollow. “It has been too long.”

 

“What do you want with me?” Corvo asked, he surveyed the youth as he paced around him, chin held up yet somehow lacking his normal air of mystery and power. “I’m done with this, my mark is gone-“

 

“And has been re-given to another, in her time of need.” The boy looked into his eyes, smirking, he must have known the father’s fury and grief. 

 

“You shouldn’t have touched her.” The man looked down as he said it, screwing up his face and furrowing his brow. “She isn’t yours, Outsider.” He almost spat the name.

 

“Oh really? And yet she bares my name upon her skin, and still scavenges the city for old bones and shrines, feral, bargaining for a taste of her days lurking in gutters and killing for you – power drawn from my blood. She is just as you are, my dear Corvo, she is mine.” 

 

“How dare you...” his already quiet voice trailed off, lacking purpose to begin with. How could he even begin to challenge a god. 

 

“Don’t you worry yourself Attano, my taint will be washed clean of both of you soon enough.” Cryptic as always, what could he possibly mean by that? “But I did not bring you here to talk of her imperial majesty, how are you feeling Corvo? I imagine this has all been quite a shock.” His tone was teasing and patronising, as usual, despite his youthful appearance which constantly contradicted this.

 

“If you want something with me then get it over with.” Corvo stared up into those pits of black with indignation, defiance and indifference where there had once been intrigue, and fear. 

 

“Now now..” He tutted, floating in his ethereal, stilted manner. _Not the same as he used to move_ Corvo noted. The outsider seemed to push and fight against the air, stunted, stilted movements like grinding stone. Once he would have floated, light as the nothingness surrounding, wisps of dark smoke as he drifted, graceful. Now he looked uncomfortable, almost in pain. “I merely posed a question, a greeting masking no malice nor ill-intent.” He smiled, or was it a grimace? He materialised in and out of being, poised, restless. 

 

“Well, as you know, I’ve been encased in stone, in single moment of purgatory for months, only to be awoken by a daughter who has suffered the worst of the world, and become all I tried to protect her from – one of yours.” 

 

“Ah, but that’s not what really bothers you is it Corvo? It’s the killing. It’s the sheltered naivety she left behind on the shores of Serkonos. She doesn’t talk about it often does she? Not her own experience at any rate, not her actions. Do you see your little girl with blood on her hands, malice in her eyes, stalking the rooftops in a metal mask, blood all over her pretty white frock? She never did say how many she killed, or if she killed at all. And this is what worries you most, is it not?”

 

Of course this was painfully accurate, he always was, and Corvo hated it. He was a man who barely spoke, who’s stony expression gave nothing away. He had been trained for decades for that very purpose, to stand in stoic silence beside the empress, to blend in to his surroundings and emerge like a swift blade-point at the smallest sign of danger. 

 

“That’s alright,” the Outsider teased, “you don’t have to answer. I know what you’re thinking.” _Bastard,_ he thought. The Outsider flashed him a snide grin. “What did I _just_ say.” 

 

“What happened to you?” Corvo asked, indicating the strange black stone and hollow chill that now occupied the void. “What happened to this place?”

 

The Outsider’s face drew itself into a hard line. Suddenly, Corvo could sense that air of mystery and power that he remembered so well – that twist of dread sharp as a knife. He uttered a single word, dripping with malice. “Delilah.” 

 

“You too, huh?” He offered. 

 

“It wasn’t just the streets of Dunwall that she desecrated.” He was ashamed, Corvo realised, ashamed at what he’d become, and the power he’d lost. He understood the feeling. 

 

“Is she gone for good this time?” Corvo asked. He’d seen Delilah’s corpse still fresh and blood soaked on the marble floor of the throne room. He’d seen it hacked to pieces by Emily – his daughter’s rage and frustration culminating in the act of making sure. He’d seen those pieces burned in the furnace and the ashes thrown into Whrenhaven river to the crusts and hagfish that dwelt there and still he couldn’t be sure whether or not he’d see her come sauntering up the steps to Dunwall tower. She’d already come back from the dead once. 

 

To his relief, the Outsider said “she’s gone. Emily was smart and put a blade through her throat. Not even the void will have her now.” He disappeared in a dash of smoke and crumbling stone, reappearing right in front of him, hand outstretched. “But the city is not all that she took from you, is it.” He took Corvo’s left hand in his – the hand that had once been his anchor to the void and its strange power. His touch was cold and hollow, as if he were a corpse moving. He brushed over the place where the mark had been, where Delilah and wrenched out his power and claimed it as her own. The Outsider stared into his eyes, black and bottomless as ever. “Wouldn’t you like it back?” He whispered. 

 

Corvo snatched his hand away. “No, no I don’t want your mark.” The Outsider drew away, a peculiar expression on his face – was it hurt? “I’m an old man with nothing more to prove, I have no need of it.” 

 

“Very well.” The Outsider said, trying to guise his emotions. It was a task that had never seemed an issue for him before Delilah. He almost felt sorry for him. Almost. “Like I said, I fear my age is coming to an end. My power is dwindling, the void barely listens to me anymore.” He seemed sad, mourning a time that was. “I suppose – more than anything – I brought you here to say goodbye.” Corvo was taken aback, he hand’t taken the Outsider as a sentimental type – or any type at all. He truly was a shadow of his former self, a human encased in fading godhood. 

 

Corvo nodded in acknowledgment. He took a final look at what had become of that great and powerful deity, the voice of corruption and temptation in the isles, finally brought to heed. “Goodbye.” As the words escaped his lips, he felt reality pull him back to the surface. 


End file.
